


Raven, Snake, or Something Else

by zylaa



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Complies with book canon and picks and chooses from Fantastic Beasts canon, F/M, Fix-It, Hogwarts years
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-01 16:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16768366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zylaa/pseuds/zylaa
Summary: Alternative title: Leta Lestrange Deserves a Better Story, Dangit, Even if I Have to Write it MyselfMiscellaneous scenes from Leta's life, starting with young Leta arriving at Hogwarts and meeting her best friend.





	1. Chapter 1

Leta Lestrange never knew her mother, because she had killed her. Her father said as much, when she was a tiny child and asked why, after another playdate with her fellow pureblood children. Though house-elf and human nannies oversaw these playdates, her friends always talked about mum this, and mummy that, and mother this other thing. Leta thought mothers sounded sort of like her house-elf nanny, Tansy, except human. All affection, always there when you needed her. Leta did not think mothers would be anything like fathers. Fathers were quiet, and cruel, and distant, like the tops of trees in ice on the worst days in winter, when the air was so cold it hurt.

Leta gathered up the courage and, one night at dinner, her and her stepmother and father all together, asked, “Father, why do I not have a mother?”

Her father turned his icicle eyes on her and said, “You killed her,” just like that. Leta heard her stepmother scold, “ _Corvus_ ,” as she fled the table and the room and almost the house. She was too short to reach the carved raven door handle.

Even Tansy’s assurances later that evening could not stop Leta’s tears, or Leta’s conviction that it was her fault.

Leta’s mother and father had loved each other very much. Both of ancient and noble houses, they’d grown up together. Leta’s mother’s family had come to Britain with the Romans; Leta’s father’s family with the Saxons. Centuries of wealth and prestige had groomed each of them into perfect avatars of their family’s standing in Wizarding Britain. But that could not save Leta’s mother.

There is a long tradition of excusing men who have lost loved ones. He lost the woman he loved—of course he’s cold. Of course he’s angry. Of course he despises his own child—she has the audacity to look like her mother. The universe itself must fold to ensure he is never reminded of the woman he lost, while at the same time, his every action turns around the pain of her death.

Leta grew up the monster lurking in her own home.

When Leta came to Hogwarts, the Hogwarts Express was less than a century old. A century was nothing to purebloods. Most pureblood parents still waged war against the thought of their precious heirs, the vessels of their blood, the diamonds of the wizarding world, taking a _train_ with _muggle-borns_.

Leta flew into Hogwarts in a pegasus-drawn carriage, alone.

She’d heard from her pureblood friends about the Sorting Hat. When the hat draped over her head, though, and the voice sounded in her ear, she almost jumped.

_Curious…such a thirst to prove yourself. Such a longing for others to love—_

_I know it’s going to be Slytherin, sir, hat, sir, you don’t need to drag it out_.

_What?_ The hat sounded surprised, if you could convey surprise in a mental voice like leather flapping.

_Slytherin is where monsters go,_ she thought. She thought of herself. She thought of her father.

_Are you sure? You are searching for kindness, and Hufflepuff would give you what you seek. But your ambition is undeniable…so if you insist—_

_Yes—_

“SLYTHERIN!”

Leta had met the other children from the ancient and noble pureblood houses. The ones closest to her age, who knew her best, knew her as a quiet girl. Much more quiet in the past few years, which, when you were eleven, was a lifetime.

Slytherins knew how to work people. Leta did not. Her pureblood peers knew by now that Leta, even if she was Their People by birth, was not Their People by temperament. Her ambition was a quiet, underground sort of thing, like the force that drives up mountains. When you’re eleven, and you’re looking to uphold the name of your house and prove your worth to stand among the wizarding elite, you gravitate towards ambition that shows.

Many Slytherins were from insignificant houses, neither noble nor ancient. Some were known half-bloods. It had been decades upon decades since the last pureblood push for control of the wizarding world. More than half of Slytherin house found the whole blood nonsense embarrassing and spent their free time spinning dreams about how to make Slytherin _better_. And that kind of Slytherin wasn’t particularly inclined to reach out to a member of a noble and ancient house. In short, though Leta found that Slytherin house had more humans than monsters, neither humans nor monsters had much time for her.

Although her classmates remained a mystery, Leta soon discovered something strange and wonderful. She loved school. She loved the moment when her Sting-Soothing Potion turned from dark green to a textbook-perfect cloudy blue. She loved turning grass to straw to needles to matchsticks, an endless succession of tiny changes. She loved making things float, and would cast surreptitious “Wingardium Leviosa”s when nobody watched just for the fun of it.

One cold day a few months into the year, she bundled up in as many layers of clothes as possible to go down to the thestral paddock by the edge of the Forbidden Forest. In those days, the gamekeeper was an aging wizard who knew his limits, and one of those limits was the forest tree line. The thestrals were kept in a massive cage, all iron bars with very little spellwork. The cage was as large as the quidditch pitch with a rounded roof like a birdcage, three stories high. Enough space for the thestrals to get up to a gallop and leap into the air.

Leta watched two thestrals race each other around the paddock, her breath steaming in front of her face. Aside from the thestrals, all was silent. Then distant footsteps started crashing down the slope behind her. Leta whirled, one hand going to her wand.

A boy ran down the hill. He moved like someone had enchanted a scarecrow to run a 500-meter dash. His Hufflepuff tie flapped behind him as he ran. He didn’t stop until he reached the thestral fence, where he clung to the bars and stared in. The paddock was long enough that he was just barely in earshot. So when he started climbing through the bars, Leta had to shout, “What are you _doing?_ ”

The boy jolted, hair flopping about his face. When he saw Leta, he shouted back, “Don’t worry, there aren’t any spells on it!”

“That’s not...” Leta took off running towards the boy, or at least jogging towards him. “There are animals in there!”

“I know, I’m here to meet them,” he said. He watched Leta’s shoes as she ran. “I don’t suppose you know if any are out now, do you?”

Leta found herself flummoxed. His statement raised so many questions they formed an impolite, jostling queue. The one that shoved itself to the front was, “How are you going to meet them if you can’t see them?”

“Well I’ve been studying their calls and behavior, you see,” the boy said. Now that Leta had reached him, he was resuming his crawl through the fence. “The Hogwarts library has a sad collection of books on magical creatures, but they have this _brilliant_ book on thestrals.”

“They’re not dangerous?” Leta said. She looked over at the nearest thestral, and its black eyes starred back from its skeletal face.

“Oh I wouldn’t say that. Any animal can be dangerous, you know, if you push it enough. But you wouldn’t call a deer dangerous, would you?” Leta considered this. She wasn’t sure she could picture a deer being dangerous, even if the principle of the boy’s statement was sound. The boy was inside the paddock. He pulled a sack out of his robes. “So you see, I’ll just take out some of their food—“ he pulled out a _slab of raw meat_ “—and give their call, and they’ll come right over.” The nearest thestral had started sniffing with its cavernous nostrils as soon as the meat was out. Another, farther across the field, had perked up its ears. Then another.

“Wait!” Leta said. Newt stopped. Again, he didn’t quite look at her, but he looked in her direction and stopped looking wildly around the paddock of animals he couldn’t see. “There’s an easier way. I can see them.”

The boy _did_ look at her that time, _right_ at her, for a brief moment that shocked them both before he looked away. Why had she told him that? Why? The cold of the mountains was suddenly too close to the cold of the ocean, and the silent forest edge had no sounds to distract her from the memory of a baby’s cry.

“I’m terribly sorry for your loss,” the boy said, in a voice that was at once deeper and less natural. He was imitating someone. Perhaps a father. Leta tried to return to the present.

“Thank you,” she said, faintly. “Can we not talk about it?”

“Ok. Yes. We can still talk about the thestrals, right?”

“Right.” Leta felt her past breathing down the back of her neck, so she did the only thing she could do and climbed into the enclosure.

“I’m Leta Lestrange,” she said.

“I’m Newt. Newton Scamander, technically, but please call me Newt.”

In the time that they’d been talking, more and more thestrals had caught the scent of the raw meat. Half the herd was walking towards them. Leta had liked watching them from outside the enclosure, when she had the security of thick bars between her and the animals. Being encircled by bony, horselike creatures twice her height was something else entirely.

“Newt,” she said faintly, “There’s a lot of them.”

“Oh good! How many?”

“Ten? I think ten.” One was getting _very_ close now, only a few more steps away.

“I didn’t bring enough meat,” Newt said wonderingly.

“What’s going to happen when they don’t all get meat?” Leta asked. The closest thestral dipped its head down to sniff her. Leta tried to stay very still. “Newt. Newt. They’re right here.” She stopped talking. In the silence, the snuffling carried. Newt mutely held out the meat.

With a speed that made Leta shriek, the thestral whipped its head around, stretching its neck to its fullest length to tug the entire piece of meat out of Newt’s hands. The thestral bounded away, lightly, tossing its head. It was very pleased with itself. The other thestrals, now that their fellow had made the first move, charged.

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Newt squeaked, wringing his hands, even though they had just held raw meat.

“They’re fighting over it,” Leta said. Newt squeaked. “But not bad fighting! Like—like dogs wrestling with a toy.” Indeed, two of the thestrals had broken off from the pack and were playing tug-of-war with the meat. The meat did not last long before tearing. Leta imagined what it must look like, seeing a slab of meat careen through the air and spontaneously split in half.

When they realized that the original slab of meat was gone, the thestrals turned back to Leta and Newt. Leta narrated in an undertone as thestrals sniffed the air, cautiously approaching. One came within a few feet of Newt. He must have felt its breath, or heard it, because he looked in the right general direction with rapt attention. He started slowly, slowly reaching out one hand.

“Not there,” Leta said. She reached out for him, then stopped. “Do…do you want me to help?”

“Please,” he said. Leta took his wrist—it seemed cleaner than his hands—and guided his hand gently towards the thestral’s nose. It was basically a horse, right? Horses liked being pet on the nose.

Leta braced herself for Newt’s reaction when he touched the leathery thestral skin, but apart from a sharp inhale, he didn’t react. Her respect for him grew slightly.

This is when they heard the shouts of the groundskeeper, who had just noticed the two children in his paddock of skeletal death horses.

Leta had spent all her months at school so far trying to be noticed as little as possible, so the next couple hours were torture. The groundskeeper shouted about how _could_ they do something so reckless, did pureblood children not realize that their mommies and daddies couldn’t save them from rampaging beasts? Newt interrupted the groundskeeper to say something about how he was being quite rude, since thestrals would never attack unless they were threatened first, and no self-respecting thestral would ever be threatened by humans as small as they were. Leta just barely had time to register that he was offended on behalf of the _thestrals_ when the groundskeeper resumed his bluster.

Next up were their heads of houses. Two professors at once hearing the groundskeeper’s story, then their story. Two sets of lectures about responsibility, safety, well-being, and respecting the rules. Then they brought in the Care of Magical Creatures professor, Professor Tarribottle, who listened to the entire story from the professors, then the groundskeeper, and then, as if they were an afterthought to the whole affair, Leta and Newt.

When they had finished, Professor Tarribottle, a burly woman whose arms were a latticework of scars, regarded the two children, neither of whom met her eyes. Leta saw that Newt was blinking back tears. Leta didn’t cry.

“It seems to me that an appropriate detention would be mucking out the thestral stables,” the Care of Magical Creatures professor said. “They don’t muck themselves. Which, by the way, Professor Bellingfast, you promised to do something about.”

“Er…” said the Hufflepuff Head of House.

“But in the meantime, these two students will do.” Newt looked up at Professor Tarribottle, all sorrow wiped away. He was positively beaming. Leta had known this boy for only a few eventful hours, but she was not in the least surprised that enforced mucking out stables would make him happy.

Leta was pretty sure other people made friends without getting a detention along the way. But even when she was wandlessly shoveling thestral poop, she had no regrets.


	2. Chapter 2

Being the weird kid at school was better when you had someone to be weird with. On the other hand, when you spent a lot of time hanging out with invisible animals considered ill omens by the bulk of the wizarding world, you go a bit beyond “weird” in school lore. Leta got used to hisses of “freak” behind her back and to her face. Meeker housemates avoided eye contact with her and clutched their wands when she walked by. Given that Newt hated eye contact too—and she didn’t blame him for that—Leta had some days where she felt she would blow away on the wind if she had to go a single minute more without someone seeing her.

“People call things monsters only because they don’t understand them,” Newt said, often. He was convinced that he, personally, could make people understand if he tried hard enough. He was always telling people the latest interesting thing he’d learned about the magical creatures near Hogwarts—most through personal observation. That first Christmas, over the holidays, Leta searched the whole Lestrange library for books on magical creatures. She found a couple and brought them back for Newt. He bought her a bracelet, which confused her.

“I asked my brother what to get as a present. I’m not good at presents. I can’t give people a magical creature, and what’s the point of anything else?”

Leta heard mention of Newt’s brother rarely. People just weren’t as interesting to Newt. But Newt’s brother, also a Hufflepuff, seemed to be one of those baffling children who managed to be liked and respected by their teachers and their peers. A regular prefect-in-training.

Leta saw him from a distance only a couple times in her first years at Hogwarts. In her third year, Newt invited her to visit their home over the holidays. Leta wrote a letter to her stepmother, not her father, who agreed that so long as Leta was properly escorted by Tansy the house elf, she could floo over for an afternoon.

Leta dressed in a crisp purple robe with the family’s raven crest embroidered over her heart. She held Tansy’s hand, the picture of young respectability, as she stepped into the fireplace.

She stepped out of the Scamander fireplace and something large and feathery and very fast bowled her over.

“ROSCOE! _Bad_ bird, _bad!”_ a woman rushed over to Leta and crouched down next to her, helping her to her feet. “I am so, so sorry, I had to bring the chicks inside with the blizzard coming in. They really aren’t meant to be indoors, especially with all the energy they have at this age—PINKERTON, PUT THAT DOWN.” The woman sprang to her feet and tore off with the same energy. Leta caught her breath as Tansy patted her knee reassuringly. She was finally able to take stock of the room.

She’d arrived in what looked like a study. Yes, there to her left was a large desk of dark wood. Just like her father’s study, bookshelves lined the walls, and leather chairs surrounded the room. But unlike her father’s study, wobbling stacks of books overfilled the shelves, and the chairs were battered and stained with a disturbing array of colors. The rug had holes scratched in it. Past an open doorway—the study had two—the woman who must have been Mrs. Scamander tried to tug a book out of the beak of a fuzzy, feathery young hippogriff.

As Leta gazed around in bewilderment, Newt appeared through the other study door.

“So that was my mum,” he said. “The hippogriffs are…”

“Energetic,” Leta supplied. “Can I play with them?”

“Mum would love that,” Newt said.

Leta looked down at Tansy, who was looking between Leta and Newt with eyes almost perfectly round in horror. “Er, Newt, do you have somewhere safe for Tansy to stay where she won’t be trampled by hippogriff chicks?”

This is how Tansy ended up drinking tea with the Scamanders’ lone house-elf while Leta, Newt, and Newt’s mother tried to wear out a whole gaggle of six-month-old hippogriffs.

“This is not how outings usually go,” Leta said, later, as the family gathered around a heavily scored dining room table. Newt’s father distributed hot cocoa.

“I suppose the noble and most ancient houses have people to exercise their hippogriff chicks for them,” Newt said.

“I don’t think any of us have hippogriffs.”

“Griffins? Manticores? Dragons?”

“All of those are much more dangerous than hippogriffs,” Leta said.

“I thought you liked dangerous,” Newt said.

“I tolerate dangerous when it’s you,” Leta said. She took a sip of her cocoa.

Theseus descended from his room, where he’d been hiding, and stepped over the sleeping chicks sprawled at random on the floors.

Theseus asked Leta, “So aside from magical creatures, what are you interested in?” Leta couldn’t help the surprise that flitted across her face. She hadn’t expected the older brother Newt spoke so reverently of to take any interest.

“Transfiguration is probably my favorite subject, outside Care of Magical Creatures,” she said. “Though Charms is fascinating too.”

“It helps that Professor Gadsby is so interesting,” Theseus said. And so, the miracle of small talk progressed, something Leta didn’t realize until several minutes in. Most small talk she’d ever been was awkward and stilted. Newt hated it. Small talk with other heirs to noble and ancient houses was like flinging knives; small talk with her father was unthinkable. Theseus, and then his parents, were the first glimpse she’d seen of the buoying power of small talk. I exist, you exist, and I’m glad we’re existing together.

It helped that Theseus was a couple years older, of course. By the end of that night, Leta was convinced that Newt’s older brother could do no wrong. If other people were so kind, she would try to get to know them more often, Leta thought.

Newt’s mother gave her a big hug at the end of the night, and Leta hugged back until Tansy politely tugged the hem of her much-more-disheveled robe.


End file.
